by Matty McPherson (@ghostplanetmatt)
Where does one start with describing and qualifying the work of the formerly Baltimore-based, now 75% Berlin-based quartet known as Horse Lords (Andrew Bernstein, saxophone/sometimes drums; Max Eilbacher, bass; Owen Gardner, guitar; and Sam Haberman, drums and the lone Baltimore lord)? For over a decade this has been the kind of question that has pegged the band through message boards and critic roundtables; spaces that keep trying to pin down just what lofty intentions and genres THESE four dashingly dapper gentleman (the commitment to dress shirts and slacks is endearing) are keen to articulate. Every piece of their catalog feels like a larger part of a patchwork, like their old mixtape series. One such case, IV, was both cunning and witty as well as about five years ahead of the pack when it comes to presenting Julius Eastman's disco-laden compositions; all the while they keep making pieces for operas or playing modernist showcases for audiences composed of boomers. Earlier interviews with the band stand away from punk and rock while making an incessant notion of how much these lads enjoy early electronic and general dance music. Guitarist Gardner had his mind blown listening to Neu!'s one-track mindset sonic approach; enough so he seemed to have fused it with a "better to play one note well than two notes at all" philosophy into a gospel, centering his instrument around repetition of microtonal chord repetitions.
If it is not apparent, bands like this do not simply just happen in general independent musical landscapes. Few and far between do bands like this exist: from the psych jammers of Sunwatchers and Garcia People's live performances, to the sneaky traditionalism of 75 Dollar Bill's and Gong Gong Gong's street vendor melting pot polyglots; even Fly Pan Am's penchant for modernist dance movement and Senyawa's dutiful tinkering and boots on the ground approach. All these bands feature a member and are practically designed for someone who is over the age of 33; an age at which you could either be a father or have a PhD. Truly all of these acts should be acknowledged as being in a dialogue with a continuum of post-rock that was last spotted when Labradford called an indefinite hiatus and Constellation became the de-facto outpost of such things.
Why several reviews of Comradely Objects have refused to acknowledge that this act is in a much more transient, regionally spread dialogue of what broadly would have passed as "post-rock" 25 years ago strikes me as malpractice, as much as a symptom of why Horse Lords continue to incite such a Rorschach test of takes and influence thought lines in reviews and interviews. 90s post-rock could moonlight as a melting pot of genre and influence but it was a novel direction for listening music; it never felt quite tailored for a 21st century information class, but introverts and outcasts. Yet today it makes sense that this quartet, when considering their staunch approach to taking rock instrumentation and often forming grid-laden rhythm patterns, should be in this reading.
The main reason this act should be classified as post-rock above all is that they have traversed a rather precarious "novel or nothing" approach that has grounded their work: the tunings of Just Intonation. They've praised the gospel before, but their big interview and spread in a recent edition of the Wire made it rather obvious; this is a band honing in on an incredibly situated notion of the sound they want with this process. An idea more or less, that western musical scales have perhaps reinforced a myriad of limitations and blockage of alternate paths towards sounds many listeners honestly do not have a benchmark for, but would be inclined to hear. It does not help that the quartet's access to information on Just Intonation has been left to various situated practitioners that may not be inclined to share or serious leisure enthusiasts who've left breadcrumb trails across blogs. Nor that the software technology needed to properly tune and scale has only been coming into focus within the past decade or so. On top of this, none of these lads are conservatory players; they're just well studied and deeply nerdy about making this kind of electric music.
As such, each Horse Lords release has often carried that characteristic of functioning as a semi-annual report of how far their soundscapes are evolving and what they are inclining towards. Each Horse Lords interview implies something will happen down the line that which each culminating release recalls, while employing usage of ten dollar words. All the while one ponders "is this merely a curated list of utilitarian reference points? is this a functional call to revolutionary arms? is this a benchmark for what current post-rock can and should be?".
Comradely Objects is arguably the most platonic release of the quartet's quintessential style they have concocted to date; everything falling in its right place doing exactly what music is supposed to. Yes, the band's revolutionary politics strike me as mere sloganeering and reference points of discovery that a reading list in liner could really just suffice. Yet, the sound on these seven cuts, studio-recorded (and in the case of “Plain Hunt on Four” "manicured" in post-production over several months), that totals 41 minutes, accomplish a task the band has been inching towards and actively ace–with caveats that few other bands really want to go for. A functioning and novel act of transcendence. Totalism may ring true through this style of their tunes, but the tuning, references, and tempos create a triple distilled beefy sound that actively wants to transport the listener; hell, maybe even strike a pre-conscious thought process. When the album works best, it becomes its own acid test that functions like Coil's Time Machines: frequencies that impart a trance without so much as a comprehension of time passing.
There are three standouts that reflect this effect proper. The one-two opener of “Zero Degree Machine” and “Mess Mend,” really only separated by splices, function as a sprawling compendium. The former lurches to life under Haberman's galloping polyrhythms that hold the piece steadfast. Interplay between Gardner and Eilbacher slinks and locks into a nifty pattern that suddenly becomes an all out charge that quivers with tingling electric timbres; it's an astute buildup that practically telegraphs the same tension of a Payday 2 assault, even down to the detente that see Bernstein's saxophone spiral into another assault on “Mess Mend”. Started in 2020 as a piece for a Baltimore Opera, “Mess Mend” is the most outright jubilant cut this band has crafted to date. For starters there's the house piano line that brilliantly blesses the piece with a bustling swagger akin to a traffic parade; Haberman and Bernstein practically perform a wombo combo on drums, assembling an inaka of rhythms reminiscent of Strut’s seminal Nigeria 70 series. Yet, it also settles into the larger "system" of the cut's psychedelia before the dance line is truly implemented; you can still dance to the piece, but this is a novel context the band even seems they need to further in a future endeavor. Meanwhile, Gardner's guitar is wielded as a banjo and teleports between left and right ears over headphones like we're going Brakhage. Truly it is an immaculate tone that genuinely rivals the insanity Wes Mudd seemingly pulled out of his ass with his guitar tones on Come Clean as much as... David Behrman's own radiance and ideas of electronics as players and affects within a system (Horse Lords err more towards the latter than the former, but those guitar tones are truly that terrific). That “Mess Mind”'s instrumentation does achieve the just intonation timbres, it becomes exceptionally easy to trance out in the latter half. At least up until the track warps into electronic mode and seems to humorously implode on itself with the veracity of two lads on discord responding "no u" as fast as possible.
As the album goes on, it is to each piece's credit that it quickly knows its MO and why they are sequenced as such. Brevity-laden cuts like the frenetic “Solidarity Avenue” and “Rundling” could seem like mere stopgaps in the pacing, but actually display the chemistry and sonic endeavors that make Horse Lords set-up so endearing. The former cut’s horn droning and watery effects seem designed to strike up a centripetal space. The notes Bernstein's horn hone in at perfect syncopation on the later cut groove to infinity. Perhaps the star and most philosophically rewarding cut of the LP is “Law of Movement”. The ten-minute plus juggernaut seems to have three main pieces: a long drone, a rollicking chase section built on top of the drone, and a detente outside the drone; the later two pieces do parallel situations found within Bernstein's Hausu Mountain tape from this year. Shockingly though, it parallels the pace of Jon Hassell's centerpiece "Malay" from Fourth World Music Vol. 2. Each of these longforms' middle sections are beget to percussive and horns and have a sense of movement, a kind that feels rather of modernist spaces and even invokes the dread of a seminal "noir". Both pieces do not *quite* dance, but the trance can be found there within.
Yet, where both pieces differ comes in the way you can apply Dave Hickey's essay "The Delicacy of Rock and Roll" towards "Law of Movement". Hassell crafted insular jazz, a personal transcendence that he could be free in but also, didn't really sound like anything else–it was a theatrical spectacle. Meanwhile even if the quartet refutes the term, they still invoke Hickey's idea of rock and roll as "the four of us–as damaged and anti-social as we are–might possibly get it to-fucking-gether man, and play this simple song. And play it right, okay?" Of course, the rock band is not supposed to play the song right. But Horse Lords in all their wisdom on "Law of Motion" will make the intonation intersect, not bend; the beat moves not against formal expectations, but with them. Whatever dissonance lies from their grooves, honing on a clean, crisp movement that locks you in and never lets go. Perhaps then "Law of Movement" implies Comradely Objects is a critique of rock music, or more or less a path from another ocean we just have been failing to seek for too long.
Truly, Horse Lords might stand too perfectly in the middle of that current post-rock continuum I've drawn up. They're DIY enough to crowdfund the making of this album 3x over, but have too much tech and refinement necessary that they can't play on the corner like 75 Dollar Bill. They don't quite have the institutional support to strike this album as true "high-art" for an academic context, yet this music still struggles to scale to any festival outside Big Ear–and that's not contemplating the jam festival circuit. While with this album they may truly just be the most clever guitar-based dance band to exist since Happy Mondays, they still refuse to make a "House Lords" release that would confirm their rave supremacy. Horse Lords are no anomaly, just a reality of where alternate rhythm based music can exist. I am still perpetually finding a wealth of fascination from Comradely Objects, and support considering it more honestly outside any "downtown music" and "high art" writ large. It just is.